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Newsletter Dec 2014

Well it has been quite a whirlwind since the last post, I haven't been able to write for a while. I have a bunch of updates that I wanted to share and hope moving a blog "newsletter" type of format works.

No longer working for an end client -
Interesting things going on in my household. Moved from a client to working for VMware directly now. It has been a month and I am enjoying it immensely. Hopefully I am able to share more tidbits than I did before.

SRM 5.8 -
Site Recovery Manager has finally been migrated from a VIClient only plug in to a web client accessed service. The other plus is that requirement for the full SQL server as part of the solution. The install is slick and quick including the install for the embedded database server. The only issue I found is around the path, as perl is installed as part of the installation and fails the whole installation on a "space" found in the path. A little more research has to be done as part of this but so far it is much better than previous versions.
The install requires vCenter 5.5 U2 at minimum to install.

Sending F11 through a Mac to an VM running either under fusion or workstation (RDP to the workstation host) -
This one sparked me to write in this blog again. Cmd + Fn + F11 is the only way to transfer these hot keys to the VM. The Mac in its infinite wisdom intercepts the F11 and minimizes everything on the screen. (Yes, I have a Mac with the new position)

Ever wanted a way to ping an entire subnet and don't have access to a tool to do it? Well this one liner allows that.

The For at the beginning says the variable $i is equal to one, the semicolon separates it from the amount of times the loop is run 1..254 and then the $i++ increments the loop by 1. (You can specify every 5th IP if you want)

The next section runs the windows builtin ping.exe command (make sure you include the .EXE extension) with the switch -n (which means number of times) and then in brackets you are specifying the IP to ping. The where statement at the end is looking for a match of "bytes=32" default output for a successful ping.

I was working with VMware Update Manager and was running a scan on the entire VMguest infrastructure. Well the Update Manager service hung. I am not going to say anything more about that. :)

So I went to the UM server and attempted to restart the service. It sat in stop pending for quite awhile so I decided to kill the process. hmmm how do I do that? I was going to use powershell but the only cmdlet's available are to get- and stop- and restart-. All in the same token as going through the GUI.

Tasklist.exe /SVC
This displays all of the services running and their PID

Taskkill.exe /PID <PID #> /T
This terminates the service and child processes.

This killed the Update Scan on the VIclient and allowed me to restart the service.